for a sizeable room, and with no windows – no outside walls – ideal for a vampire.
And that meant the entrance would not be through any of the main rooms of the house. Iuda would want to be able to rise from his coffin in the cellar and go straight to whatever was hidden in there, without passing by any windows and the inconvenience of daylight. Dmitry returned to the cellar steps. He did not go down, but closed the door at the top and examined the wall that had been hidden when it was open.
The switch was easy enough to find. With a click Dmitry felt the panel in the wall loosen. He pushed and it swung back. He stepped through.
It was a study. The walls were lined with shelves and in the centre stood a desk and chair, facing the door. A great mirror with a gilt frame hung quite unnecessarily on one wall, to the side of the desk. Dmitry stood and gazed into it, but saw no reflection of himself, just as Iuda would not have seen himself when he stood there. The small room behind was visible in every detail, but of Dmitry – of any vampire – there could never be any sign. Why would Iuda have put it there? It could be that it dated back to a time when Iuda was human, but it seemed improbable. More likely it was there only to serve Iuda as a reminder of what he was – a memento mori, but of what had passed, not what was to come.
It was a reminder for Dmitry too, but as ever when he looked unseeing into a mirror it was not his own death that came to his mind, but that of Raisa Styepanovna, the creature who had taken him from humanity – his vampire mother. He did not know quite how she had died – and thus could not decide how she was to be avenged – but whenever he saw a mirror he felt a sense of horror and revulsion that he knew came from her in the hours leading up to her death. She had gone mad, but the last lucid thought he had shared with her was her anticipation that soon she would once again be able to see her face.
He turned back to the room and began to search. The shelves were empty. He inspected them all and saw faint markings in the dust that suggested they had once been filled with papers, but either Iuda had taken them away himself, or someone else had got here before Dmitry. He turned his attention to the desk. There were a few items on its top – a dried-up inkwell, a paperweight, a candle – nothing of any interest. There were nine drawers, four on either side and one in the middle.
Dmitry pulled at the central one. It wasn’t locked, but stuck after he had opened it only an inch. He tugged, and it gave with a click. At the same moment, Dmitry heard a scraping sound behind him, and realized what a fool he had been.
He flung himself to one side, half rolling, half sliding across the desktop before landing heavily on the dusty carpeted floor. He stared back at where he had been standing. In the shelves behind the desk, right behind his back, a panel had dropped open, revealing behind it some contraption whose nature he could easily guess at. There was a grinding, squealing sound and something began to move in the darkness. Then the movement stopped with a clunk and a long, thin cylinder rolled sideways and fell to the ground. All was still.
Dmitry got to his feet. He bent forward and picked up the cylinder. It was essentially an arrow, though slightly thicker, made of wood except for the feather fletches at the rear end. The front had been sharpened to a point. The mechanism from which it had fallen was a crossbow, aiming the wooden bolt at the heart of whoever had so incautiously stood and opened that drawer. But such a complicated mechanism needed care and maintenance, and this had received none for many years. Some of the metalwork was rusted, and Dmitry could see the marks where rats’ teeth had gnawed into the wood. A few pieces of string hung loose where once they would have been taut, presumably thanks to the same cause.
Dmitry laughed, both at his luck and his stupidity. He could easily have